Windows: There are a lot of great desktop email clients available for Windows, but Mailbird promises to bring some elegance, simplicity, and useful new features to your desktop. We've been testing it for a few months now, here's what we think (and how you can try it out too).

At first blush, you wouldn't be wrong for thinking that Mailbird looks an awful lot like Sparrow, our favorite mail client for the Mac. Many of the same features are available in the same places: messages display on the right in a collapsable conversation view. Tags, labels, reply/reply all, and info buttons are all in the same places. Even the layout is similar. That's no mistake: Mailbird was clearly inspired by Sparrow's simple, functional design, and that's not a ding: why fix what's not broken? So Mailbird is like Sparrow for Windows...if Sparrow was kind of sucky. Here are the pros and cons.

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What It Does Well

Mailbird does offer some great features on its own. It syncs perfectly with Gmail and can access all of your labels and folders. You don't get advanced features like canned responses and filters, but basic Gmail functionality is there, and we recommend having a desktop email client on hand for a number of reasons, even if it isn't your main source for email. Also, Mailbird is fast. Composing and sending messages is a snap, search is quick and accurate, and the app supports Gmail keyboard shortcuts, so if you're familiar with the web interface, you don't need to learn a bunch of new tricks.

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Mailbird also has add-on "apps" to extend its functionality. Some of the ones pre-installed (but not enabled, you'll have to do that manually) include Dropbox for attachments, contacts, calendar, Facebook—which goes beyond just downloading profile images and contact information but also lets you post status updates and keep up with your friends, and even a Lifehacker app that brings you right to our site. The developers plan even more apps to extend the app's functionality as it marches towards public beta and eventual launch.

Where It Falls Short

It's not all roses with Mailbird though. For starters, the app in its current state only supports one Gmail account. No POP, no IMAP, not even more than one Gmail account if you have multiple. The developers say multi-account support is on the way, but it's hard to even discuss an email client without it. Instead, they're working on "multi-identity," or account aliasing, but that's not the same, and it's not nearly as useful.

The other major downside is Mailbird's pricing. While in beta, the app is free, and if you sign up using our invite link, you'll get six months of Mailbird Pro for free, even after the beta ends. After that, there'll be two versions, Free and Pro:

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The free version will be ad-supported and attach a "Sent Using Mailbird" link at the bottom of your messages.

The Pro version will remove the ads and the signature link, and let you add as many accounts as you like (when that feature exists. This implies free accounts will either not be able to add multiple accounts, or only be able to add a few-the folks I spoke with didn't say.)

The Pro version will also cost you an annual subscription of $12 USD/year (you can pre-order now for $9/yr). You'll have to decide whether that's worth your money, especially compared to apps like Postbox (one-time fee), previously mentionedInky (completely free), or our favorite, Thunderbird (completely free) with more forgiving price tags and more features, even if they're not as pretty, lightweight, or fast.

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How to Get It

The team behind Mailbird plan to launch their public beta on April 2nd, but if you want to give it a try now, they've offered us 3000 beta invites for Lifehacker readers. You'll need to use the referral link below to grab it, but they're only offering Mailbird to the first 3000 people who click it. After that you'll be in line to join the public beta on the 2nd.

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Update (11/28/2013): Mailbird has unveiled support for multiple accounts, resolving one of the biggest dings we had in our review. It's still a subscription mail client, but at least you can use it to manage as many accounts as you want now.